the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about our day. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bleak Season”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with watered the whole back garden yesterday. Not with the “tower sprinkler” you see to the right of me (it’s now been put away in the shed) but with the oscillating sprinkler he got earlier this year, a Melnor XT Metal Turbo, which he likes a lot.
He said he watered mostly because it helps keep the leaves he raked into various parts of the garden in place. He knows people who rake leaves and then throw them into the trash, but he doesn’t do that.
(Some parts of the garden don’t get leaves raked onto them because the plants wouldn’t like it.)

It really isn’t all that dry here, compared to some years; we did have an hour of rain last week.
But it looks kind of dry. And autumnal.

Water is still running in the canal. I had to inspect the old sluice this morning.
As I’m sure I’ve said before, there was a steel wheel at the top of the sluice gate behind me, but somebody swiped it.
There used to be a farmhouse to the north of here, behind me. The wheel was turned and the gate opened upward, and water flowed to the farmhouse.
And sometimes you can see trout in the water, especially in the foreground where the water slows. We haven’t seen any trout this year.

We haven’t seen a lot of things, like goldfinches, orioles (maybe one or two), striped kitties, and raccoons, but fortunately there was no plague of grasshoppers this year.

Back in the garden, there are still flowers, though not a lot except for snowdrops.
The tiny colchicum, Colchicum baytopiorum, is still flowering.
The guy I live with said the species was named for two Turkish botanists named Baytop, and the ending -orum is genitive plural, “of more than one”.  I’m sure you wanted to know that.
There’s also the beautiful light blue Crocus baytopiorum.  I guess I’ve never shown a picture of that crocus; maybe next spring.

There are more Crocus oreocreticus.
And one of the latest crocuses, Crocus hadriaticus ‘Purple Heart’.
There are also some Crocus ochroleucus starting to come up; kind of a tiny one and may not get its picture taken.
That’s always a late crocus here, and it tend to form lots of tiny cormlets which don’t flower for a few years, but it is nice to see something in flower in late November.

Speaking of things that flower late, or super early next year, the guy I live with noticed that Viburnum farreri has lots of buds on it.
The plant at Denver Botanic Gardens can be in flower any time from about mid-December to the end of February, but the one in our garden is in more shade and so flowers later.
The flowers are scented like heliotrope.

I’ve shown pictures of this oak before, but the color today was particularly nice.
He got this from the late Jerry Morris; he doesn’t know what the species is. It produces acorns about the size of the nail on his little finger. Either finger, really.

And there there’s the moss in the trough, which I’ve also shown before. (It’s nice to have at least some continuity from year to year.)  The guy I live with thinks this is a native species which may have come from a trip to the mountains a long time ago.
It becomes totally brown and dry during the summer, to the point where clumps of the moss can be easily dislodged.
The guy I live with really got into moss after reading Moss Gardening by George Schenk, which he says is one of the best gardening books ever, and I’ve probably said that before, too. There are a lot of posts on this blog, after all.
Unfortunately this isn’t a terribly ideal climate for moss, but this species seems fairly content to live here.
We do get quite a bit of lichen growing on the wood of the patio frame and elsewhere though.

I’d like to close this post with a little editorial comment.
It seems to me that my dinnertime is later than it was last week, which, let me tell you, has taken some getting used to. The guy I live with said it was something about the clocks “setting themselves back”, which sounded very weird to me. He explained that “back in the old days” people would set clocks back by turning dials, but now the clocks do it by themselves.
Also, the period between my dinnertime and the time when darkness falls seems to be a lot shorter than it was last week.

So my evening walks have seemed early to me, like practically in the afternoon, but dark.
The guy I live with took a picture of the canal, illuminated by lights from the apartment complex.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me inspecting something farther down the canal road.
The sluice I pictured earlier is just beyond that boxelder tree which looks like it’s in the middle of the road, but isn’t.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about antifreeze–not the car kind, but the plant kind. You may remember me from such posts as “The Ghost In The Grapevine”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was nice and sunny today, but last night it kind of froze. There was ice in the bird bath, anyway.
The other day, the guy I live with noticed that the pinyon in the front yard (Pinus edulis) had nuts.
He said he could sometimes find bags of these in Mexican groceries not very far from here, and that the roasted and salted nuts are very, very good.
You can also use these for making pesto.
I think he’s just going to leave these, since there aren’t very many. This may have been the first time these pines produced nuts.

Of course there were crocuses in flower the other day.
This is Crocus oreocreticus. (The word oreocreticus is from the Greek oros, mountain, and creticus is Latin for Crete.)
It’s a member of the saffron crocus family.
This is the real saffron crocus, Crocus sativus (the commercial one, you might say; sativus means “cultivated”).
Those are crocus leaves behind the flower; you can tell by the white stripes.
The guy I live with forgot to collect the styles to get more saffron.

There were some Crocus speciosus still in flower, too.

Anyway, it kind of froze. I went around the garden to make sure things were okay.
So here we go.

The guy I live with saw a Facebook post showing Nerine bowdenii in flower, which it does now, and he asked the person when the leaves emerged. The answer was the following spring.
The guy I live with tried to grow this bulb many years ago, and it produced leaves just about this time of year, and of course the leaves froze and the bulbs died. He consulted a number of what he would call authoritative texts, and some said leaves over the winter, and others said leaves only in spring.
The plant is native to South Africa and a website from there said the plants are dormant in winter, so no leaves.
He said this was a complete mystery.

Plants with overwintering leaves in cold-winter climates manufacture “antifreeze” (sucrose, glucose, fructose) to prevent the water between the cells from expanding which would basically causing the plant to explode from freezing.
Lots of plants do this. Conifers do it, and in fact they can completely stop photosynthesis during cold winters. They just sit there; the pinyon pictured above can go eight months without photosynthesizing. They certainly don’t need to be watered; that should have been done before cold weather set in, since the manufacture of “antifreeze” is due to photosynthesis.
Basically any evergreen plant hardy in our cold winters makes “antifreeze”.  Otherwise they would die.
Hardy cactus do something different; they lose water and shrivel, and can’t take up water until the following spring.
(The guy I live with said I could include scientific references for all this, but I thought it would seem too pretentious. He also prefers the term “cryoprotective sugars” instead of “antifreeze”.)

Autumn-flowering crocuses with overwintering leaves manufacture “antifreeze”, and so do snowdrops.
Snowdrops are super-tough plants and are completely unfazed by being frozen.
This is Galanthus bursanus again, after being sort of frozen. (The leaves on the left are Lilium candidum, another plant that can deal with very cold temperatures; the leaves stay green all winter, though they may look a bit battered.)

I’m pretty sure that’s all I have for today.
The guy I live with said that the Big Scary Night was tomorrow (he has plenty of Kit Kats), but I’m so exhausted from all this antifreeze talk I may sleep through everything.

Until next time, then.